Posts Tagged ‘security’

This week’s Tech Roundup includes WordPress 3.3, power user guides for Chrome and Firefox, IE to auto update, and HTTP status cats.

What’s the Most Secure Web Browser? – The study was funded by Google and not-surprisingly Chrome was ranked the most secure browser. Each browser has a study that says their browser is the best. Still, the results are interesting.

The Power User’s Guides to Chrome and Firefox – A must-read if you spend all day in your browser, you like to tinker, or you just like to get the best out of your browsing experience. They cover interface tips & tricks, customized settings, add-ons and extensions, and other features.

Internet Explorer to auto-update – Surprising and exciting! Microsoft is, essentially, going to force you to update your browser. XP users will get IE 8 and Vista and Windows 7 users will get IE 9. In theory, this will make the lives of designers and developers much easier. But let’s see if it works, first.

Check If Your Android Phone Has Carrier IQ, No Rooting Required – If the idea of rooting your phone is scary or you have no idea what that means, check out this article instead. You can download an app that will check to see if you have Carrier IQ on your phone. It sounds like future versions may have the ability to remove it without the need to root your phone.

7 Ways to Protect Your Printers – There’s been a lot of talk this week about your network printer being vulnerable to attack. If you’re wondering what that means and what you can do about it, take a look at this article.

24 ways – It’s back for 2011! This is the “advent calendar for web geeks.” Each day in December you get a little dose of web design & development goodness.

Fico, a font with icons – This is kinda fun and it could be very useful! It’s a web font that is just icons of commonly used graphics like heart, plus, arrows, star, camera, etc.

This week’s Tech Roundup includes WordPress infographics, free fonts, and a new security tool for small businesses.

New Tool to Help Small Businesses Plan for Cyberattack – The FCC is developing a tool to help small businesses with their security planning. The tool will ask a series of questions and output policies and suggestions based on those results. Be on the lookout for it later this month.

20 High Quality Free Fonts Every Designer Should Own – As an admitted font hoarder, I was excited to see this as a reminder of some of the fonts I lost in a recent upgrade (the one thing I forgot to back up – ugh!). It was great to somewhat replenish my stash.

A Brief History of Web Standards – Another infographic. This one is very informative. It takes you all the way back to 1962! It covers technology, typography, and web standards.

15 Point Checklist: WordPress Start-Up Guide After Installation – A handy guide for what to do after you install WordPress. There’s an pared-down advanced version and a more detailed beginner version. I can see this being really useful for both types of users, particularly for beginners as it explains what everything what each is and why it should be done.

The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Building a Hackintosh – One of these days I’ll build a Hackintosh. It’s on my “someday” list. For those that don’t know, or can’t tell from the name, a Hackintosh is a computer running OS X on non-Apple hardware. This guide takes you through the entire setup process. It’s pretty slick. Take a look!

Lifehacker put together an in-depth four-part series this week for all of your Windows 8 curiosities:

The future of CSS layouts – This article takes a look at how CSS3 can and may, in the future, be used to create website layouts. These are really slick and I’m super excited for them. These new elements cut down on code and, if all browsers support them the same, headaches (although they’ll cut down on those anyway). I think even with the browser-specific CSS, these solutions are still less code than current methods. But, even with browser-specific code, you’ll still run into older browsers that don’t support an element at all so make sure you know your users before implementing. If you’re interested in this topic, check out the author’s (Peter Gasston) book, The Book of CSS3.

I read a lot of blogs. I subscribe to a lot more blogs than I have time to read. Sound familiar? If you're like me, you don't have time to read everything you want (if you do, please tell me your secret). In an effort to reduce the chaos of life, I do two weekly article roundups: one for technical things and one for small business things.

Here's a roundup of the most interesting tech articles I found this week. Enjoy!

Power, Outlet: U-Outlet, Dual Socket/ Dual USB, 110V, TruePower – I don’t normally post products but this is something I ran across this week that is too cool not to share. It’s a power outlet with built-in USB ports. It’s perfect for charging your USB devices (smartphone, iPod, etc.) and only $23. Sounds like a great weekend project!

Rating the browsers against a sample set of European malware URLs over 19 days in April, IE 8 achieved a mean block rate of 90 percent, leaving Chrome 10, Firefox 4 and Safari 5 in the dust on 13 percent each. Opera, which uses technology from antivirus company AVG, came in last on 5 percent.

When assessing IE 9 with application filtering turned on, the results were even more dramatic, taking that version to a mean blocking rate of 100 percent.

This is a huge win for Microsoft, but it won’t have me pulling up IE next time I want to browse the web. It does, however, make me a little more wary of my other browsers.

Gui:Config for Firefox Gives About:Config A Proper Interface – This Firefox add-on gives you point-and-click access to About:Config. It’s great if you like to tweak your browser settings but are intimidated by the traditional interface or if you are familiar with About:Config and just like things to be easy.

Microsoft Drop Conditional Comments in IE10 – There’s nothing worse than developing a website that looks beautiful and just how you want it in every browser but IE. Starting with IE10, conditional statements will be no more. In theory, there won’t be any need for it as all modern browsers will render websites close to the same. Don’t get too excited, though. You’ll still have to use conditional statements for IE7, 8, and 9 (and 6, if you’re still coding to it).